From

n'l~~'t,fA

Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus.

Anton Powell, ed. London 1997.

'Augustan' and 'Anti-Augustan':

Reflections on Terms of Reference
Duncan F. Kennedy
When we read a classical text and pass a judgement upon it as to
whether it is 'Augustan' or 'anti-Augustan', there is a tendency to think
that we are doing an obvious and straightforward thing. The 'commonsensical' view is that we are separated from the Romans by two thousand years, and that this huge chronological gap allows us to adopt the
stance of detached observers passing judgements according to a stable
set of criteria and in an agreed set of terms. That is, a situation deemed
historically determined is studied in accordance with terms and criteria
thought not to be so determined. This is an oversimplitication, but not a
radical misrepresentation of much of what gets written on the topic of
'Literature and Politics in the Augustan Age'. But we should pause for
thought. A term like 'literature', automatically invoked in such a discussion, has emerged from a very complex process of development and
carries in it traces of the forces that have determined its meaning; 1 and
the Romans had no term which represented the range of meanings that
have become associated with the English word 'politics'. Words cannot bF;
taken for granted or as something given, but themselves have a history
and are involved in history. Granting them a history involves consideration of what are the determinants of their current usage. Language,
and views of what language is and how it operates, are part of the
context which language seeks to describe. In what follows, I shall
examine some of the ways in which the context of our interpretation, its
social, political, and cultural presuppositions, the institutions within
which such interpretations are produced and the norms they impose,
are part of that interpretation and govern what sorts of explanations
critics are prepared to accept and describe as 'valid' or. 'natural' or
'obvious' or 'true', and what terms are deemed 'appropriate' or
'proper'. Thus the discussion will be as much about 'us' as it is about
'them'; but the validity of this distinction also, itself an issue of ideological contestation, will be put under scrutiny in a consideration of the way
26

that readers of texts are caught up in a collusive relationship with those

texts, a relationship in which interpretation deemed valid involves the
reproduction of the terms and criteria on which the original reception
of the text was based. Reproduction involves recontextualisation, and
recontextualisation involves change of meaning, however subtle and imperceptible that may be. The politics of August;an poetry is inextricabl~'
linked with the politics of talking about it. A recurrent theme of this
paper will be the way in which the meaning ,of the term 'Augustus'
changes as it takes on the ideological colouring of the context in which
it is invoked, and continues to be the point of intersection of contesting
ideologies here and now, as competing interests attempt to exercise
control over the discourse of the past.
Let us start by reflecting on the English word 'term'. It is etymologically cognate with the Latin te17llinus, a boundary-stone, suggesting a
model of language in which terms are boundary-stones which divide up
conceptual space within fixed and defined limits. At first sight, this is
rather reassuring, implying that language is firmly rooted and our conceptual space carefully mapped out into neat lots. Language could be
figured in other ways with different metaphorical entailments,:! but the
prevalence of the property metaphor (seen, for example, in 'define',
'determine', 'conceptual space', 'limits', 'mapped' in the last two sentences alone) indicates how one particular view of what language is,
rather than any other, is already inscribed in the very language we use to
describe language, directing our attitude to it and predetermining certain guiding assumptions in such a way as to allow them to be taken for
granted and not examined.3 To use any word is to step into a world in
which myriad interpretations have already been made on our behalf.4
This model of language and the preconceptions it encodes, of language
as static and with fixed referents, underpins not the mode but one mode
of interpretation, as it happens the one that recently has been dominant
over other contending modes. But the questions it is possible to ask
about property rights can also be asked about conceptual terms.5Why is
a particular boundary stone set where it is and not in some other place?
By whom, and in accordance with what criteria, was it put there? By
what authority does it remain where it is? Whose interests does it serve,
in its placing where it is, and whom is it meant to exclude? Property
rights can come to seem so natural that they are not challenged; the:'
,are observed equally by those whom they exclude as by those who
-:.benefItfrom them. But the siting of property divisions where the~' :lre is
the result of a long process of conflict and contestation, and is regulated
to the finest detail by the massive institution of the law. Thc stability of
these divisions, their naturalness or rightness, is temporary, conditional,
even illusory; at any moment they might become subject to challenge or
27

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statuary and the visual arts,12 T.P. Wiseman on topography and architecture,13 and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Mary Beard on calendars14
have brought out how symbolic associations were mobilised to promote
the image and authority of the man whose name they would immediately bring to mind, Augustus. However, language is involved in mediating. these associations, and it is difficult, and methodologically
problematic, to disentangle it. Words are the principal medium through
which meaning acts to develop, enact, and sustain relationships of
power. 15
Speaking and writing are social acts, and what gets said or written is
subtly moulded and modified by the context of the utterance and the
anticipated conditions of reception, whether it will meet with consent,
opposition, defiance, or whatever. Every utterance, whether those involved realise it or not, thus enacts a relationship of power, challenging

transgression and be moved (or even suspended) as a result.6 Similarly

the word 'term' gives an initial impression of something not open to
dispute, but again this emphasis on stability suppresses the long process
by which particular terms were shaped into their current usages, became acceptable and thought of as natural or objective 7 - it suppresses
their history, that is, whilst serving the interests of some people at the
expense of others. Words no less than property raise questions of possession, title, right, authority, and power, and are no less subject to
institutional regulation (primarily that of the educational system and the
academy),9 all the more powerful for not being seen as such (cf. pp.
36-8 below).
The boundary stone image of language suggests that terms are neatly
circumscribed. On a more technical level, the image constitutes
meaning asa static set of autonomous categories based on a system oi
inclusions and exclusions which are ideologically determined, lOapowerful mode of thought which moulds our preconceptions in a process that
even shapes the institutions we work in. In this mode of thought, Language is an autonomous category and the inclusions and exclusions it
represents can be seen, for instance, in the preconceptions underlying
the proverb 'actions speak louder than words'. Words are no less part
of social action and interaction than deeds, though this mode of thought
tries to. impose a boundary between the two,11a boundary which has
manifested itself in the different ways the ancient world has been interpreted. On the one hand, there is social interactionism, in which language and symbolic systems play little or no part in the analysis; and on
the other, linguistic formalism, in which language and texts are analysed
with little or no reference to the specific social and historical conditions
(often consigned to the margins as the 'background' or 'context') in
which their production and reception were, and are, involved. Institutionally, this distinction is reflected in the division, now becoming less
emphatic, between historians and literary critics in classical studies and
classical departments.
This definition of language has worked to exclude acknowledgement
of the social, historical, and political, and to suppress the association of
language and power. A pointer to the way this system of inclusions and
exclusions works is the use of the word 'and' (the boundary stone par
excellence separating demarcated fields) in phrases such as 'Language
and Power', 'Language and Politics'. Recently the autonomy of such
categories has been coming increasingly under question as an awareness grows of the ways in which symbolic meaning works to create,
render legitimate, and perpetuate relationships of power and authority,
and equally of the ways in which symbolic meaning can be appropriated
to subvert such relationships. Studies such as those of Paul Zanker on
28

or confirming su~eriority or inferiority, exercising 'a gentle, invisible

form of violence', 6 which can be at its most effective when it is not seen
in terms of authority and compliance, but concealed under titles such as

IJ'

\t!
1.Tl.'

'politeness', 'deference', '~propriateness' etc. Relations of power are

thus part of the meaning1 of every utterance. When taken on a large
scale, acts of speech and writing will tend to mobilise meaning in one
direction rather than another, to the interests of particular individuals
or groups rather than others, and so cumulatively produce the social
structures and hierarchies of a particular society. Politics are thus inscribed in language-in-use as part of its meaning, and create their effects partly by their ability to conceal their presence. Radical shifts of
power within a society are effected not only by force of arms, but more
subtly by changes in the direction of this mobilisation of meaning in thFinterests of different individuals or groups.
Linguistic formalism is a very elaborate methodology which, in its
characteristic process of categorisation ('language and power', 'politics
and poetry'), enacts the suppression of the explicitly po!itical in its
object of study. As the dominant methodology of Latin literary studies,
it accounts for the failure of theories of symbolic power to make the
headway they have in other areas, and for the considerable conceptual!ideological18 resistance they have encountered. The recent reception of Horace's Satires provides a noteworthy example and suggests
some reasons for this. Until recently there had been a remarkable
consensus on these poems. In 1973, Michael McGann referred to 'the
generally apolitical nature of the Satires,.19 Nine years later, Gordon
Williams could be found to remark: 'there is also theleast reflection on
political issues [in the Satires and Epistles]; those are the particular
theme of the Odes,.2o In the same year, Niall Rudd wrote: 'few of these
[Satires and Epodes] touch on politics, and those that do conveyatti29

tudes of disgust (Epod. 4), disillusion (Sat. 1. 6) or despair (Epod. 7 and

16)'.21 Horace's perceived responses are comforting to, and reinforce
the self-image of, critics who feel themselves in some way detached
from the political processes of their own society. The recent assertion of
a wide-ranging political dimtnsion for the Satires22 met with the criticism that the term 'political' is being used 'in a rather extended sense of
the word,.23These comments are, of course, symptomatic of a tendency
in Latin literary criticism to see politics only with reference to formal
political institutions and the personalities directly involved in them; but
there is much more going on here than that, and it is necessary to
examine the preconceptions underlying these critics' use of the term
'politics' and equally their feeling that its use is not appropriate in
certain contexts.
Significantly, the proper sphere of reference of terms like 'politics',
'political', 'politicise' and so on is usually deemed to be issues of conflict, overt differences and instances of disruption. However, reconciliation and integration are no less political processes in that they affect the
distribution of power in specific social contexts, and yet they do not
attract the description 'political'. This conventional restriction has an
ideological diinension, being symptomatic and illustrative of the way
our discourse - the words we use and the way that we use them in
varying contexts - is, at the moment anyway, mobilised towards quiescence, and the acceptance and maintenance of the [tanlS quo. For a
long time now, the boundary stones of this term have been so placed as
to include the 'disruptive', the 'oppositional', and the 'agitational', and
to exclude the 'consensual' and the 'integrative'.24 There are currently
widespread attempts to move these boundary stones,25 and the repercussions of this are being registered even in the discourse of Latin
scholarship ('the term "political" is being used in a rather extended
sense of the word'). In an expressed desire to bring about social change,
some would wish to apply the word to everything, even the most 'mundane' things - perhaps especially the most mundane things, in order to
emphasise that potentially everything can contribute to the distribution
of power in society - and that what does not get described as 'political'
can be one of the most important factors in that distribution: 'disagreements about the scope and domain of "the political" are themselves
constitutive features of political discourse' (Ball 1988, 13). As significant as the siting of the boundary-stones of the term 'political' in the
criticism of Horace is what is deemed to lie in the adjoining fields,
excluded by the boundary stone from the field designated 'politics'. In
this ideological scheme, Literature is one such field, a repository of
eternal values and truths over against the diurnal sordidness of politics

30

('few of these poems touch on politics and those that do convey attitudes of disgust, disillusion or despair,).26
So, contrary to a very strong, widely-held, and largely unexamined
preconception, meaning is a shifting and unstable phenomwon: terms,
like property divisions, are not as permanent as they seem to be at first
glance. Terms and expressions may appear to have a stable meaning in
their particular context, but this stability (which is an accommodation to
the established relations of power in which the expression lies, or an
equilibrium of tensions) is in a crucial way illusory, limited, and problematic, and is open to disruption, contestation, and change.27 To take a
Roman example: the term libertas had for a long time been a central
and 'stable' one in the ideology of Republican Rome and was perhaps
more potent and valued than any other - the prime plot of land, to
pursue the property image. However, this stability had been disrupted
because of its appropriation by various interests in the turbulent and
sectarian aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Each wanted
the positive and valued connotations of this word to be associated with
it. One of the many grounds on which this battle was fought out was
Horace's Satires. Though the word is rarely used explicitly in the poems,
libertas is one of the central preoccupations of the Satires, its delicate
political connotations being mediated principally through discussions of
the less sensitive term aequitas, through coded readings (presented as
'literary' comment) of the 'free' and 'outspoken' aristocrat Lucilius, and
through remarks on the soCialconstraints upon Horace as the son of a
freedman.28 The ordlibertas in Horace is no less interest-laden than it
is elsewhere, but ucceeds in not appearing so. Horace's iqsertion of it,
into his own int rational, quietistic discourse, as a non-agitational
quality, constitut d a reassertion of the positive connotations of a valued but disrupt d and hence partially discredited term. In the Satires,
libertas, very
ectively presented in such a way as to recuperate its
reassuring connotations, was relocated within a political discourse to
which it had previously been believed antagonistic, that of an emergent
autocracy. A sense of stability, of 'normality', of 'continuity' with a previous tradition was being re-established, but within a new, overarching
set of power relations. A term previously mobilised to support a nonmonarchical system (imperceptibly, perhaps, to manl of those involved)
changed direction to support an autocratic one.2 To return to the
property image, title to the prime plot of land and its benefits had
, passed to Augustus; but, more than that, the boundary stones had
moved slightly. The word libertas may have looked the same, but its
meaning had changed.
All such abstract terms need to be examined to see what are the
specifics of the context in which they are invoked and by which they are
31

defined, to see whose interests are served by their invocation and how
the abstraction works to conceal the play of interests. Friendship is a
.recurrent theme of the Satires, and its presentation is the focus of much
of the critical approval of the poems. It is presented in abstract terms as
the pinnacle of right thinking: nil ego colltuleJim iucundo sanus amico:
('as long as I am in my right mind, I would compare nothing to a
pleasant friend', 1. 5. 44). In a context in which civil strife is figured as
furor (madness),3 the metaphor sanus encodes the reference to the
here-and-now, the political charge of what is presented as a 'general'
statement about 'friendship'. But what social practices and specific actions attract the description 'friendship', and whose interests are served
thereby? 'Friendship' is a highly selective construct of inclusions and
exclusions, involving an indulgent forgiveness of what are called by the
emollient term 'silly errors', actions which when analysed in context
turn out to have a political colouring:31 mihi dulces / ignoscellt, si quid
peccaro stultlis, amici: ('my kil1dfriends will pardon me if, in my foolishness, I have committed any peccadillo', 1.3. 139-40). Social conflict was
also figured as sin in the Roman discourse of civil war.32The particular
action designated as 'sin' by Horace, but in the same breath distanced
by the phraseology of si quid peccaro ('if I have committed any peccadillo'), was to have fought for Brutus and Cassius against Octavian at
the Battle of Philippi. People are the focus for a host of symbolic associations which encode their social position and power. The use of the
plural33 amici suggests the statement is a generalising one, and that it
refers merely to people whom Horace knows and has warm feelings
towards; but the context of the poem suggests that one in particular is
meant, Octavian, who is named in the Satires only at the beginning of
this poem to which this is a coda, but to whom our attention is turned
back in the convention ofreading referred to as ring composition. Reconciliation (so often the effacement of the 'political'), as here, and the
avoidance of ,excessive' criticism (viz. the accommodation to, or acceptance of, the interests of others), are given an insistent and privileged place within this defmition - as in 1. 3. 25 ff.: cum tua pervideas

finds its release in 1. 5, the journey to Brundisium, in which Octavian

and Antony - who could be defined from another perspective as rivals
for power (or enemies) - are termed, in their immediate interests, amici
('friends') in a context where such a paradigm of friendship is presented
as having widely desirable results: huc velltunts erat Maecenas optimus
atque / Cocceius, missi magnis de rebus uterque / legati, aversos soliti
compollere amicos ('here we were to be joined by the excellent

faults as a bleary-eyed man might whose eyes are unanointed, why is

your sight in the case of your friends' faults as sharp as that of an eagle
or Epidaurian serpent?'); also at 43 f.: at pater ut gllati34 sic nos debemus
amici / si quod vitium sit non fastidire ('we ought not to be offended at
any fault ofa friend, no more than a father is with the defects of a
child'); and at 53 f.: opindr, / haec res et iungit, iunctos et servat amicos
('this [forebearance], as I see it, makes friends and should keep them
once made'). This arouses in the reader a pattern of expectation which

Maecenas and Cocceius, both sent as envoys on momentous matters,

whose custom it is to bring together estranged friends', 27 ff.). This
pattern of expectation is aroused within a continuum of experience
which is crucially, for both Horace and his readers and for us, punctuated and organised discursively into two areas deemed to be separate~
the 'private' or 'personal', and the 'public'. The Horatian discourse of
friendship invokes, and in its own view restricts itself to, the 'private',
but, beyond its own view of its own workings, operates across the
boundary as well.
The Satires, with their potent mixture of unremarkable received wisdom (that is, the 'knowledge' and beliefs according to which Roman
society organised itself), their mild and reassuring tone, and their avoidance or softening of whatever in the circumstances of their composition
might have been perceived as controversial, sectarian, or antagonistic,
are an integrational text par excellence. As such, they may well have
been as little perceived as 'political' at the time as they have been in
modern criticism (though allowance must be made for the heightened
sensitivity to language that is a frequent feature of situations of conflict), but they were part of the process whereby the young Octavian of
the proscriptions of the 40s Be was transformed into the saviour of the
Republic at Actium. It is less important (and not easy) to quantify the
contribution the Satires made to this process,35 than to note their involvement and investigate the way that involvement (has) managed to conceal itself. It is only possible to bring into view the dimension of
Horace's poems that they conceal and exclude - their part in the historical process of the formation and continuing legitimation of a complex of power relations - if we make the effort to see the terms they
present (amicitia, libertas and the 'equivalents,36 we substitute for them,
'freedom', 'friendship' and so on) not as obvious or given or taken for
granted or an unquestioned part of our thinking. This is all the more
pressing the closer these terms lie to the centre of the value-system
through which our social practices are articulated. This is not to regard
as morally bad what was previously regarded as good (though inevitably
this process of defamiliarisation will not be entirely without consequences), but to recognise the way that Horace's text - which marginalises the political by demarcating its subject matter as belonging to

32

33

oat/is mala tippus inunctis / cur in amiconl1/l vitiis tarl ce17lis acutum /
quam aut aquila aut serpens Epidall1ius? ('whilst you examine your own

morally overdetermined categories (the 'ethical' or 'the good life') 'responds to' (i.e. validates, legitimises) readings which operate in
categories 'equivalently' overdetermined.37 Terms are always a selective
designation of social practices, the chopping up of the continuum of
social action so as to include certain parts and exclude others. To gain a
sense of how Horace's text is working, the question to be asked is: What
social practices are getting called by the terms liberlas, amicitia etc. in
any particular context and whose interests are served thereby? The
meaning of a term is constituted not only by what it includes, but by
what it excludes also; and by the act of placing the boundary-stone
where it is, the use of one term rather than another, or none. Thus, in
context, in the way they are invoked in relation to interests, terms are
not politically innocent, nor are they 'stable': their meaning changes in
the act of usage as a function of context.
The very abstraction of these terms as disinterested absolutes in
critical discourse reproduces and masks the means of the Satires' initial
effects. The Satires invite (and have succeeded in securing)38 the collusion of their readers in the perpetuation not only of the values they are
perceived as embodying - warm approval of 'freedom', 'friendship' and
so on (and thereby the interests of those with whom those terms are
associated) - but on a deeper and more insidious level, the separation
of experience into the discrete spheres of the 'personal' and the 'political', promoting compliance and quietism by suggesting that politics are
the domain of a limited group of people and should be left to them. The
notion that you should restrict yourself to your own sphere is programmatic in the Satires: Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam ;;ibi sortem / seu
ratio dedelit seu Jors obiecelit, illa / contentus vivat, laudet diversa sequentis? ('How does it come about, Maecenas, that no one lives con-

tented with the lot which either choice has given him, or chance thrown
in his way, but rather extols the fortune of the one who follows a different path?', 1.1. 1-3).
Divisions between the 'public' and the 'private' are ideological in that
they mobilise power in society in sEecific directions and thus serve some
interests at the expense of others. 9 The so-called 'personal' is 'political'
in that the constitution and exercise of power involves compliance. It
can be precisely those things that present themselves, or are presented
as, apolitical that are the most actively political in allowing power to be
accumulated and exercised in ways that extend beyond the notice of
those involved. Both the act of categorisation and the process, where
the boundary-stones are placed and why and in whose interests, are
crucial.
Stability of terms is in an important sense illusory, but in an equally
important sense, it is not. Different individuals or groups have a dif34

ferential capacity to make a meaning stick,40 to make libertas signify not

'freedom' (from a rex) but 'freedom' (through a ... plinceps). The right of
any individual to use a particular expression with a particular meaning
in particular circumstances is both an index and issue of power. A
corollary to this is that stability of meaning, the feeling that words have
a fixed and assured meaning, is a hidden function of the stability of
power: recall the complaint that is regularly voiced in the conditions of
a radical shift of power in society, the complaint of a Thucydides or a
Sallust that 'words are not being used in their proper meanings,.41 From
this point of view, such stability of meaning is related to what are
termed 'institutions', nodes of social relations and concatenations of
material resources which form a relatively stable framework for action,
of word no less than deed. From this perspective, the emergence of the
principate might be viewed as the progressive re-organisation of a fragmented discourse, whose previous centre was provided by the institutions of the Republic, around the plinceps as the new focus of stable
meanini)n society. Conven~io~allywe ten~ to look upon Augustus as a
person, ~but he was more slgmficant as an Idea. The power of Augustus
was a collective invention, the symbolic embodiment of the conflicting
desires, incompatible ambitions and aggressions of the Romans, the
instrumental expression of a complex network of clependency, repression and fear. 'Power' emerges from this discussion not as something immanent, an attribute of an individual, but as an analytical
term.43 As a legacy of methodological individualism, its associations of
immanence imply a structural unity, stability of command, and control
of consequences that are belied by the exercise of authority and force.44
Important as the term is, it is equally important to be aware of the
dangers of integrating, or collapsing, everything into a single master
discourse, the discourse of 'power'. The definition of 'power', it must
not be forgotten, is itself ideologically determined.
Where words are used in such a way as to comply with or reinforce
,established or dominant relations of power in society (and so to reproduce them), their usage generally passes without notice: the property
rights are respected and the boundary-stones are an unremarked part
of the landscape. But where there is no focus of authority in society, or
where power is on the move or being challenged; then the use of poten, tially any word can be fraught with the deepest anxieties. Under such
circumstances, language becomes, in common parlance, 'politicised'. In
the absence of stable or agreed meaning, a speaker is aware t~::\t his
words will align him with a particular ideological position and be perceived as a challenge. There is a reduced possibility - or in extreme
circumstances, none at all - of coalescing imperceptibly with the perceptions, beliefs, and values of others, that is, of situating oneself with35

out friction within the network of existing power relationships. The

extension of this is anarchy or civil war, where agreement on the
meaning of key terms has broken down, and the symbolic interchange,
the symbolic 'violence'45 which organises the distribution of social
power, extends to physical violence. When language (always the focus
for contestation, though not always seen in those terms) becomes 'politicised', any number of different meanings for the 'same' word can be
jockeying for supremacy to become THE meaning, and where there are
conflicting meanings for the same word, a speaker cannot legislate for
his audience which they are to accept, or predict which they will, for the
one they will accept will be a function of their ideology.46 However,
some 'stability' is necessary for even the most minimally organised society to function. This is the place of convention, the encoding of a
specific relationship of power and social structure within an expression
or act so that it is taken for granted, affirmed, and reproduced. A
convention is thus defined by its unselfconscious accommodation to
existing networks of power, and is the elision for those involved of the
enactment in the use of a word, gesture, or deed, of relationships o~
superiority or inferiority. Where a complex array of conventions is established (and thus power is relatively stable), reception is relatively
determined and assured, and can be taken for granted.
In the light of this, the application by critics of 'convention' as an
analytical term needs to be given some attention. It is used of both
social behaviour and literary topic, and slides easily between the two;
indeed, a collusion can be detected. What are inscribed in society as
social practices are reaffirmed as literary conventions and appear to
. justify themselves by 'imitating life'. 'Life', however, is not a pre-given
entity or body of experience but is itself discursively constructed, so that

to analyse, robbing it of its specificity. It is the abstraction of action

from the context of power, of compliance or opposition, of affirmation
or contestation, that invests that action with its signific<\nce.It conjures
away the relations of power by which a particular act or utterance is
constituted as legitimate (or otherwise), acts to the interest of some
social agents and to the detriment of others, and is reproduced as the
dominant form of social action. The 'naturalness' of a convention indeed the description of something as a 'convention' - is a function of
the observer's ideology, and may.be less interesting as an observation
about the text or its reception than it is indicative of that ideology, that
is, not only what the observer believes to be true, but of his or her place
in the dynamic hegemonic process whereby consent to the dominant
relations of power in society is produced.48 The culture of abstraction
and definition, whose mode of thought is essentialising and which expresses its believed relation to language in the figure of the boundary
stone, is highly successful in suppressing in its thought the dynamics of
power.
Power is a constituent of the meaning of texts no less than of language. The conceptual separation of 'literature' and 'politics' conceals a
collusion. The survival and prestige of the works of Horace benefited
from, no less than they contributed to, the emergence of all those forces
we collapse into the term 'Augustus'. This is an on-going process in
which we are involved. It is.when a text is perceived as replacing conflict
with reconciliation, as reinstating or reinforcing all that is considered
most central in the tradition (that is to say, the established ideology,
perceived within the culture as a series of transhistorical truths) that it
qualifies for the canonical status of a 'classic'.49 It is not insignificant in
this respect that Horace became a classic in his own lifetime.50 The
canon of classic texts to which a society defers and which it enshrines in
its educational theory and practice is one of the most potent vehicles for
the perpetuation of that society's dominant ideology. The canonical
status of Horace's poems in Western culture and education has played

when we have the sensation of art being like life, what we are feelin.pis
'the momentary congruence of one set of codes with another'.4 In
either sense of 'convention', its usage generally involves an important
suppression. With its reassuring connections with 'coming together' and
'agreement', it gives a' comforting impression of stability of meaning
about an utterance or act, and consensus about its significance. 'Conventions' do tend to become more visible as such, as social practices
alter over time, but the use of the term, the description of a specific
practice as a 'convention', has a flattening effect, implying that regardless of the context in which a particular act or utterance takes place, its
significance will always be the same for all those concerned: it will be
taken for granted and not be a source of conflict; its role in reproducing
and rendering legitimacy to a hierarchy of power is suppressed. In
eliminating from the start the possibility of a conflict of interests in a
particular instance, the term depoliticises the situation it is being used

its part in reproducing those beliefs, disf,0sitions and values on which

the initial impact of the text depended: 1 Horace's works play an important part in a process of ideological reproduction which ultimately
emerges in modern critical discourse as the unquestioned acceptance of
the 'Augustan Age' as an organising historical category and point of
perspective for historical analyses of the period.5:!
Horace's poems remain, then, through the institutions which promote their reading (that is, their reading in particular ways), inextricably enmeshed in reality in their ability to create effects here and now.
They are part, admittedly a much-diminished part, of our society's
canon, and the particular way our society reads them is one vehicle for

36

37

ment to account for and e~lain the (received) status of a particular

work as literature or poetry.
The working assumption that some texts are pre-ordained as literature also underlies the dominant mode of commentary, that a text
has a 'true' or 'latent' meaning (collapsed into the author's intention
and congealed into an apocalyptic moment of composition) outside of
the way it has been received, interpreted, worked upon and appropri-

ated by people down the centuries from its first appearance. The Latin
critic characteristically presents himself as guiding his reader through
the errors and oversights of the past to this 'true' meaning. To continue
the religious image, he acts as a sort of priest or hierophant for the
'ordinary reader' who is so often appealed to (in a coded assertion of
the interpreter's authority and privileged knowledge) in the prefaces to
books of Latin literary criticism. Whilst the reading is characterised as,
perhaps, 'allowing the text to speak with its oWnvoice', what the reader
is presented with is another ideologically-coded reading. Reference to
this reading as '(nearer) the truth' or 'the real meaning' are ratifying
formulae, masking from both critic and reader the partial (in ail senses
of the word) nature of the interpretation. Such a formalism extracts
texts from the processes which shaped them and conditioned - and
continue to condition - their reception, disabling and frustrating any
sustained account of the political in texts designated as literary. Traditional philological concerns, for all their insights within their own intellectual framework/8 repres~nt an unexamined appropriation and
acceptance of antiquity's own organising categories (e.g. 'poetry') and
processes of periodisation (e.g. 'Augustan'), and a failure to recognise
the ways in which these categories owe their development and. privi1egedstatus to their complicity with the dominant ideology they helped,
and help, to reproduce.
There is an underlying assumption in criticism of this type of the
unproblematic equivalence' of terms over history, that they are the
'same', that the boundary stones have not moved since antiquity. A
whole cultural identity, the European, is grounded in the assumption of,
or faith in, the translatability of terms. The desire for continuity, to find
the same in the past, prompts this essentialising move that constitutes
tradition as 'sameness' and views it as apolitical and unproblematic. But
is Roman culture 'the same' or 'other'? Divergent interests in the present rest on the answer, and divergent assumptions and procedures of
analysis lead to the different answers. 59From the alternative perspective, cultures construct other cultures in terms of their own concerns60
as represented by their own categories. In our relationship to Roman
culture, this often emerges in references to 'immediacy', 'relevance', or
'modernity',61but this is the product of each age selecting its texts from
the past for !!pecial attention, structuring its reading of those texts
around its own concerns and then believing it passively 'sees' those
concerns as an autonomous part- of those texts.62What is called 'tradition', according to this mode of analysis, far from being an inheritance
'handed down' from the past, is an active, open process intimately connected with the pursuit of particular interests: the selective appropriation of the past to serve a particular vision of the present and to project

38

39

the perpetuation of its ideology and the reproduction of its social structures. The institution of scholarship conceals from its members their
actual connections with power, and their place in constituting the structure of society, by masking from them the part they play in this continuing process of cultural validation, particularly through the ideological
self-image of the scholar as detached observer working on an autonomous text in a politically neutral act of criticism, termed 'literary', a type
of criticism seen as good precisely because it is believed to be apolitica1.53 This is true of literary critics in many disciplines, but the methodology of Latin literary scholarship is particularly monolithic in this
respect and so has proved well-nigh impervious to self-examination.54
Characteristically it sees the texts it studies (described in the loaded
term 'classics', and regarded as embodying a set of transcendental
truths and values which are to be internalised rather than examined)55
as
sorting
themselve.s
out spontaneously
a hierarchy
majorsom~~nd
minor,
literary
and non-literary
etc., as ifinto
these
categoriesofwere
how pre-ordained rather than the result of a succession of specifi
interest-laden critical judgements in the past. The act of criticism, the
fact that a particular set of judgements has been made, is suppressed,
and literary judgement is represented as a simple reflection of an established reality. Latin scholars see themselves, more than most, as guardians of a tradition; but 'tradition' is another heavily-loaded term,
suggesting a quasi-religious 'handing down', and encourages an attitude
of reverence towards these texts as a given, an absolute to be mastered
rather than questioned. Such a methodology engenders a docile attitude to authority in general,56 and at the same time an obsession with it,
which finds an expression in the anxiety of scholars to locate themselves
precisely in the scholarly tradition in which they are working, and not to
pass judgements which are too far removed from the existing tradition
or according to criteria or canons not sanctioned by the institution in
which they operate. From this emerge the dominant characteristics of
Latin scholarship: a concentration to the exclusion of nearly everything
else on textual detail, which has as its underlying priority and rationale
the differentiation of the literary from the non-literary. This takes the
form of compiling in ever more exhaustive detail Jannal qualities such
as metre, diction, genre, allusion, which are held without further argu-

that vision into the future.63 This approach puts its emphasis on ruptures and discontinuities, and confers significance on the otherness and
uniqueness of the past; 'continuity' is criticised as illusory, the incidental
contiguity of items wrenched from the specificity of their original contexts, described in terms which suggest they are instances of the same
thing, set in chronological order, with the resulting sequence being
deemed a 'tradition'. Methods of analysis which have an interest in
establishing sameness must sacrifice some sensitivity to the process of
historical change. If, for example, Horatian categories are accepted by
his readers without differentiation, unreflectively appropriated and uncritically perpetuated, then an appreciation of Horatian discourse and
its effects, inwhich we remain involved, will be elusive.
Two different theories of language associated with two divergent
ideological outlooks are emerging here: one the static, essentialising
view, represented by the image of the boundary stones, which attempts
to set up categories as discrete and autonomous, stressing the difference between words and the continuities within them; the other the
dynamic, discursive view which sees words as the momentary intersection of a host of discourses (open-ended, conflicting, and even contradictory), stressing the difference within words, their discontinuities, and
their capacity to change their meanings. Thus, for example, 'literature'
emerges not as a discrete entity, but a dynamic category encoding social, economic, political, philosophical, and a host of oth~r practices
and assumptions, all themselves overlapping and interpenetrating. Two
consequences flow from the dynamic view. First, what as abstracts are
logically opposite by the process of definition which sets them off
against each other, can co-exist within discourse without contradiction,
as 'war' (its meaning ideologically determined) and 'peace' (its meaning
also ideologically deterinined) do in the ideology which generated the
power and position of Augustus.64 Second, words, as being the intersection of discourses to a greater or lesser degree incompatible in their
interests, are shaped dialogically.65 The dominated voice may not be
heard, but is not absent; the potentiality for subversion is inscribed in
every use of every word. Thus it is that discourse, as well as being an
instrument and effect of power, is at the same time a focus for resistance
and subversion.66 Establishment discourse is shaped by and contains
traces of its opposition (and vice versa), even if the conflicting voice is
not heard in its own right.
Within th~s dynamic, dialogical framework, the clear-cut distinction
between 'Augustan' and 'anti-Augustan' breaks down. Arising out of a
static theory of language, it overlooks the fact that, whatever the
author's intention or however great his desire, no statement (not even
made by Augustus himself) can be categorically 'Augustan' or 'anti-Au-

gustan'; the traces of its constituent discourses were - and still are open to appropriation in the opposite interest. The degree to which a
voice is heard as conflicting or supportive is a function of the audience's
- or critic's - ideology,67a function, therefore, of reception. Power is
successful in so far as it manages not so much to silence or suppress as
to detennine the consumption of the oppositional voice within its discourse. Critics' responses to Augustan poetry are a measure of the
continuing capacity of Augustan ideology to determine its reception.
'Augustan ideology' exists, however, only in an ideal sense, having
been shaped and generated by the forces it sought to dominate. An
idealising framework in retrospect freezes it and attempts to confine it
to the past and, in line with the liberal/humanist preconception of the
individual as the source and legitimation of meaning, refers the process
to Augustus and his intentions.
Two different modes of explanation, then: the 'static' and the 'dynamic'. In practice the two modes are not separable, however much
each might seek to purge itself of the traces of the other: thus, a dynamic, discursive analysis cannot avoid introducing reifications such as
'Augustan ideology'. To speak of two modes of explanation is to place
boundary-stones on a continuum, and to term these modes the 'static'
and the 'dynamic' involves an expression of value and ideologicallocation on the user's part. Criticism involves the negotiation of the rival
claims and rival interests of the two approaches within the ideological
network in which the critic is situated. My own critical practice and its
associated strategies need some comment.
Explanations are a means of social control. The increasing acceptance of the validity of a particular explanation (so that it becomes
categorised as 'knowledge' or 'fact') is matched by an access of social
power to the person or group with whom the explanation is associated.
Arising out of a view that the structure of society is a function of the
ideological construction of categories within discourse, the deformation
~f established categories has become a familiar strategy of recent criticism, often in the avowed pursuit of social change. As a corollary to this,
such theories of language and the critical strategies associated with
them will tend to find the least sympathetic reception in institutions
which are most complicit with established power and have the deepest
interest in the reproduction of existing social structures. In raising the
issue of the stability of categories and their involvement with power, this
intervention into the discourse of Latin literary studies will be characterised in some quarters as 'oppositional' and its reception may already
be partly determined (d. p. 39 above). However, 'opposition' is an
ideological term in that it (mis)represents to those who use it that
actions are against the system rather than an integral part of its shap-

40

41

, ing.68 'Criticism' itself is a mobile signifier, open to re-definition and

appropriation.
Too much of what is termed 'criticism' in the study of
Latin literature aims at what Edward Said has called 'organic complicity' with the institution of scholarship,69 seeing its role as a validation of existing norms (with their characteristic ideological exclusions
and blind-spots) and in so doing manifesting that desire to belong
(together with its obverse, the desire to exclude) which is constitutive of
all cultural formations.7o But as Said goes on to remark, 'solidarity
before criticism means the end of criticism'. 71
What emerges as 'oppositional'
always has the potentiality for recuperation in the logic of power. Granted validity, discursive theories of
langua~e can themselves become the instrument and expression of
power. 2 Criticism, ever needing to be renewed by the adoption of
strategies not regarded as the norm, acts as a necessary check on the
authority of totalising, normative explanations.
'Ideology, in so far as it seeks to sustain relations of domination by
representing
them as legitimate, tends to assume a narrative form;
stories are told which glorify those in power and se k to justify the
status quo.m History is the most important of such nar tives and gain;:;
enormous prestige through its association with truth. tories that (in
line with whatever are the prevailing criteria of 'trut ') 'explain' the
past, teleologically directing their narratives towards an individual or
movement in the present and suggesting or projecting a continuity into
the future, are a most effective legitimation of power. Such narratives,
fluid in their meaning, are therefore the focus for contestation and
appropriation,
and recent studies have shown the way in which the
inscription of Augustus within the most potent charter myths of Rome
(e.g. those of Romulus, Hercules, and the Golden Age) was disrupted
by Ovid's re-inscription
of these myths within his own frivolous discourse.74 Was the disruption a challenge? Was Ovid 'anti-Augustan'?
Did he set out to be? Possibly; but it must then be equally granted that
he could have set out to be ~wo-Augustan' when he wrote in praise of
the Emperor and his family. ) These questions, which seek an ultimate
validity for their answers in intentionalism, are those that a mode of
analysis based on a static theory of languages poses. Let us take an
instance and tease out the issues.
Romulus and Numa in Book 1of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita are characterised as polar opposites, representing respectively 'war' and 'peace':
(ita duo deinceps reges, alius alia via, i/le bello, hic pace, civitatem aLlXenmt ('and so it was that two kings in succession built up the state in
their respective ways, the former by war, the latter by peace', 1. 21. 6) in a treatment that bristles with the terminology and arguments which
legitimated the power of Augustus. For example, when Romulus legislates for his people (1. 8. 2):
42

.. .iura dedit; quae ita sancta generi hominum agresti fore ratus, si
se ipse venerabilem insignibus imperii fecisset, cum cetero habitu
se augustiorem, turn maxime lictoribus duodecim sumptis fecit
... he gave them laws; and thinking that
by an uncouth sort of people only in so
an object of reverence by the trappings
more august not only in the rest of his
by the adoption of twelve lictors.

these would be reverenced

far as he had made himself
of power, he made himself
appearance but especially

Augustiorem, more august, sticks out here: is Livy 'supporting' a similar

procedure to the one Augustus adopted? Has he perhaps drawn on his
own experience and observation of Augustus' behaviour to project an
explanation back on to the actions of Romulus? But these questions are
part of the traditional problematic which attempts to ground its answer
exclusively in the individual, Livy. Alternatively it is possible to view the
criteria of 'valid' explanation which Livy here invokes as part of the
discourse which was at the same time prompting, de~ermining the reception of, and conferring legitimacy on, Augustus' behaviour and constituting him as a focus of power. Numa no less than Romulus was part
'of a version of Roman history which projected Augustus as its telos, and
enabled him to be characterised as the rare individual who could unite
the disparate social practices (and their associated values) condensed
in the terms 'war' and 'peace'. Reference to the founding of the temple
of Janus by Numa is embedded in a narrative whose trajectory intersects the present in the person of Augustus, constructing him as the
latest example of a significantly short 'sequence' of rare and emotionally
charged contexts in which wars deemed vital for the formation and

:1

preservation of the Roman state are represented as the necessary prelude to periods of peace so rare as to be nearly unique, and abnormal,
however welcome (1. 19.3):

i'll

bis deinde post Numae regnum clausus fuit, semel T. Manlio

consule post Punicum primum perfectum bellum, iterum, quod
nostrae aetati 76 di dederunt ut videremus post bellum Actiacum
ab imperatore Caesare Augusto pace ten'a malique parta.

,~

,[/.1'

I,

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twice subsequently after the reign of Numa it was closed, the first
time when T. Manlius was consu! after the completion of the First
Punic War, the second time, which the gods have granted to our
age to see, after the Actian War by the commander-in-chief
Caesar Augustus when peace was brought about on land and sea.

'I'

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43

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The terms of description invite comparison with Augustus' record of his

own achievements (Res Gestae 13):

Livy's narrative is shaRed by a logic of social explanation, attested

elsewhere at this time, 9 that finds its analogue, and is instantiated, in
Augustus' moral crusade.
For those involved, these sentiments had meaning (whatever particular meanings individuals took away from them) because they were perceived to encapsulate a valid logic of social explanation, even if (or
perhaps especially because) Livy, in a self-satisfied gesture, characterises the explanation as being more applicable to the 'rud~' past than
the 'sophisticated' present. Even .those like Ovid, who might arguably
have wished to distance themselves from the actions of Augustus, are
nonetheless unable to escape from this discourse, and could be seen as
contributing to its consequences. Expedit esse deos et, ut expedit, esse
plltemus (Ars 1. 637) mirrors Livy's 'sophisticated' attitude, but it is
embedded in an Ovidian discourse which determines its reception as
ironic, and even 'anti-Augustan'. However, Ovid's statement, although
rhetorically resisting its own implication in this logic of explanation,
cannot be exempted from its effects, for Ovid's ironic and flippant
appropriation is part of what gives this logic its social meaning and
force, and so helps to render legitimate the moral and religious programme of Augustus. This is the discursive context which both enables
the Ars AmatOlia as witty and sophisticated text and constitutes it at the
same time as what-must-be-repressed. This is the logic that helps to
generate the 'necessity' of an 'Augustus', and thus plays an integral part
in creating and sustaining the position of Augustus.
Thus, relations of domination are created and sustained not simply
by the perpetuation of topics in the discourse ('Romulus', 'Numa', 'war',
'peace' etc.; topics are abstractions that elide the ideological determinants of their categorisation and use), but by the reproduction of the
criteria of judgement and the logic of 'valid' explanations which served
to elevate Augustus, and whose perpetuation (sometimes to the present
day) enabled his continued (and continuing) authority. Ovid is inextricably entangled in this process.so Compare the logic of explanation in
Livy 1. 19.2:

lanum Quirinum, quem claussum esse maiores nostri voluerunt

cum per totum imperium populi Romani ten'a marique esset parta
victoriis pax, cum, priusquam nascerer, a condit a urbe bis omnino
clausum fuisse prodatur memoriae, ter me principe senatus
claudendum esse censuit
the temple of Janus Quirinus, which our ancestors meant to be
closed when peace on land and sea had been brought about by
victory throughout the whole jurisdiction of the Roman people,
the Senate decreed three times should be closed when I was the
first citizen, although it is recorded that, before I was born, it had
been closed only twice in all from the time when the city was
founded.
Is the verbal similarity emphasised here direct allusion to an 'Augustan creation',77 making Livy a propagandist, albeit perhaps unwittingly?
The rhetoric of an intentionalist and individualist framework of explanation methodologically isolates Livy and Augustus as individuals from
the social and discursive practices of which each is a node, practices
which are' the enabling conditions of the Ab Urbe Condita as historical
text and of the political position of Augustus. Let us rather examine the
situation in terms of the discourse of peace at this time. Peace was
perceived and defined as having its dangers. It is a condition that can
only come about as the result of victOlY (cf. R. G. 13 te/Ta mmique ...pmta
victoriis pax),18 and the ~ery absence of warfare is a threat to the internal cohesion of the state that requires special measures for its preservation: when Numa has' secured a cessation of warfare and closed the
temple of Janus (1. 19.4),
ne luxuriarent otio animi quos metus hostium disciplinaque
militaris cOhtinuerat, omnium primum, rem ad multitudinem
imperitam et illis saeculis rudem efficacissimam, deorum metum
iniciendum ratus est

quibus (sc. legibus et moribus) cum inter bella adsuescere videret

(sc. Numa) non posse, quippe efferari militia animos, mitigandum
ferocem populum armorum desuetudine ratus, lanum ad infimum
Argiletum indicem pacis bellique fecit

in order that minds, which fear of the enemy and military

discipline had kept in check, should not run riot in the idleness of
peace, as the first priority he considered that fear of the gods had to
be inculcated, a measure in the highest degree effective for a
populace that was ign,orant and in those times unsophisticated.

when Numa saw that they could not grow accustomed to these
laws and customs in the midst of wars, in as much as their minds
were being made savage by militmy service, considering that his
wild people had to be tamed by growing less accustomed to

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44

45
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warfare, he built the temple of Janus at the bottom of the

Argiletum as a symbol of war and peace.
And in Ovid Fasti 3.277 ff., which refers also to Numa:
principio nimium promptos ad bella Quirites,
molliri placuit iure dellmqlle metu.
inde datae leges, ne firmior omnia posset,
coeptaque sunt pure tradita sacra coli
exuitur feritas, armisque potent ius aequum est. ..
First Numa resolved that the citizens, too prone to warfare, be
softened by the rule of law and fear of the gods; then laws were
imposed so that the stronger might not have power unchecked,
and ancestral rites began to be properly observed. Savagery was
put aside, justice was more powerful than arms ...
'Direct echoes'? 'Allusions' designed to 'support' or 'criticise' this
mobilisation of an episode in Roman history in the interests of
Augustus? Again these questions and terms are part of a type of
explanation which is author-centred,
individualist, and which
suppresses the social dimension of the discourse.81 Ovid may well have
thought he was supporting or criticising Augustus in his various works,
but control of meaning is always only partial and the sense of control
may be fostered by a belief in language as static.8:! Intentions are open
to ideological misrecognition; so is reception. The question 'Were
Ovid's works read as oppositional or subversive?' involves a slide back
to the old problematic. Both the immediate reception and the history of
that reception are caught up in a contemporary logic of explanation of
power in which 'opposition' and 'subversion' are ideological
(mis)representations of responses that from another perspective are
integral to the system. Readings of Ovid (then and now) as
'oppositional' or 'subversive' may have had the unforeseen consequence
for those involved83 of consolidating the position of 'Augustus'.
The immediate reception of Ovid's text, and hence its ideological
impact in creating and sustaining specific relations of power, will have
been a function of the. reading practices of his day. Those reading
practices and the institutions, both official and unofficial, that fostered
them were presumably so constituted as to reproduce the discoursf;
which created and sustained the position of Augustus. Modern reading
practices mimic their categories and interpretative procedures and assumptions, and in so doing reproduce and perpetuate the notion of the
special, unique individuality of Augustus. Methods of reacing are the
unacknowledged vehicles of ideologies.84 For example, generic reading.

Elegy represents itself, and is often represented as, 'oppositional'. It

constructs itself and sets up its frontiers vis-a-vis other genres through
the pairing of terms viewed as abstracts and presented as logical opposites, notably 'peace' and 'war,.85 For their practitioners, genres were
entities with defined content and treatment, and generic boundaries
were regarded as frxed;86they are geared to a mode of reading which
accepts them as such, a formalist generic criticism which isolates genre
and tabulates its features.87 Of course, the fun<;tionand effect of these
texts is not fully explained by the assumptions and terms with which
they were ostensibly operating. 'Peace', for all the elegists' attempts to
appropriate it to their stance, was also associated with and contributed
to the elevation of Augustus. 'Peace'/pax should not be viewed passively
as having an inert lexical meaning, open to possession as a piece of
property. The meaning of pax (and 'peace') is in part constituted by the
process of contestation over what it is to mean. That is the politics of
language. The politicising question ('What practices are getting called
by the word pax, by whom and in whose interests?') directs us towards
seeing language as a dynamic process, with signifiers having a fluid and
changeable relation to signifieds, and words like pax as carrying in them
specific interest-laden traces that are not wholly under control and
escape notice in proportion to the degree to which one adheres to a
static, essentialising view of language. The progressive effect of analyses
based on a dynamic view of language is to defamiliarise (though not to
escape) the notion of genre and the generic mode of reading, and to
penetrate beyond the formalist surface so as to see them as part of the
process which, whatever elegy's own claim to be anti-Augustan, contributes to the ideological construction of 'Augustus' and the ideological misrecognition of elegy's role in this process. The identification of
the genre of a particular work is one of the chief ways of determining its
reception, and of reproducing a reading practice.88
Conventional academic discourse's demand for rhetorical closure in
the form of conclusions remains to be negotiated. The presentation of
genres, topics, words, conventions, and terms as 'unfamiliar', as 'other',
is not a contribution to knowledge in the traditional positivist sense.
Within the framework of meaning as constituted in a process of contestation, it invites characterisation as an intervention in an ever-continuing
process. However, every characterisation, every description (even those
" !hat portray themselves as 'open' or 'continuing', d. p. 40 above),
\ exemplifies the characteristic trajectory from arche to telos that history
seeks to impose. It is the work of history to plot detennination (a return
to the image of the boundary-stone), a word which, with its image of
enclosure, embraces both limitation and purpose, control and interest.89 History-writing, in attempting to impose closure (a manifestation

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46

47

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of the will-to-power),90 paradoxically denies the historicity of history.91

To invoke any term is both to involve oneself in history and at the same
time to attempt to escape it and deny its contingency. 'Augustus'
offered, and continues to offer, the impression of a reassuring closure.92

Notes
The works used for reference in this essay are referred to in these notes
by author's name and year of publication only; their full details are
given in the Bibliography which follows (pp. 55-8).
1. Cf. R. Williams (1983), 183-8.
2. E.g. as a river, as when meaning is described as 'fluid'.
3. All figuring is partial, and the 'rule of metaphor' is perhaps most
powerful when least recognised, cf. Ball (1988), 11. The figure of
boundary-stones obfuscates as much as it illuminates, and is always
open to new interpretation and appropriation.
4. Cf. Thompson (1984), 9,133 f.; Ball, Farr, and Hanson (1989),1.
5. Thus appropriating the figure for another mode of interpretation
involving different ideological assumptions.
6. Anadumbration of the way the figuring of language is tied up with
our politics. An ideology of possession and ownership is inscribed in the
metaphor. A challenge to preconceptions about language has its correlate in our conception of how we organise ourselves politically (cf. p. 42
below).
7. Cf. R. Williams (1983),passim.
8.Cf. Thompson (1984), 1 f., 7 f.
9. Cf. Said (1984).
10.Cf. Frow (1986), 61: 'I take the following to be the general
requirements of a working theory of ideology. First, that it not assert a
relationship of truth to falsity (and so its own mastery over error) but
concern rather the production and the conditions of production of categories and entities within the field of discourse ... ' For a critique of
some widely-held associations of the term 'ideology' (including its characterisation as the thought of the other, of someone other than oneself,
its reification as 'systems of thought', and the view that ideology is pure
illusion, an inverted or distorted version of what is 'rea!'), cf. Thompson
(1984), 1 ff.
11. Cf. Thompson (1984), 42 f.; Ball, Farr, and Hanson (1989), 2 f.
12. Zanker (1988).
13. Wiseman (1984); (1987).
14. Wallace-Hadrill (1987); Beard (1987).
48

15. Cf. Thompson (1984),1-15.

\f16. Cf. Bourdieu (1977),192; Thompson (1984), 55-8.
'. ,17. Not, however, to be found in dictionaries, the sleeping policemen
.of categorical, uncontextual meaning.
'7
18. Eliding the 'and' to produce a continuum.
) 19. McGann (1973), 64.
20. Williams (1982), 15.
21. Rudd (1982), 370.
14\, 22. DuQuesnay (1984), 19-58.
23. Rudd (1986), 54 n.
24.,All these terms are in turn ideologically charged and can give
bnly a partial representation of a situation to those who use them. The
'term 'consensus' smoothes out the forces of opposition and dissent that,
in seeking to deny or pass over, it implies; for the term 'oppositional' cf.
pp. 43-6. The definition of the term 'ideological' is, of course, itself a
function of ideology, as is its invocation, or avoidance, in any context.
25. Cf. Maier (1987),1-24.
L",26. Cf. Erskine-Hill (1983), 6, discussing the civil war of Octavian
and Antony: 'The war of propaganda preceded, and followed, the war
of ships and men. It ranged from the cntdest vilification to the expression of the most deeply-held beliefs, entered the high art of Virgil and
Horace, and in different ways and to different degrees was absorbed
into histOliography so that it has deeply influenced Renaissance and
even modern views of the two great competitors' (italics mine). Cf. also
the remarkable act of demarcation in G. Williams (1983), 233-4,
, founded on the same preconceptions, between 'ideas' and 'ideology',
associating the latter with Augustus' Res Gestae and the former with the
Aeneid.

27. Cf. Thompson (1984), 132; Ball (1988), 13 f.

28. Cf. DuQuesnay (1984), 29-32.
29. A major point of transition is its appropriation in Octavian's
propaganda to represent the issue involved in the civil wars, cf. HoT.
Epod. 9. 7 ff. (on the war with Sextus Pompeius), ut lluper, actus cum
freto Neptunius / dux fugit ustis navibus, / minatus Urbi vine/a, quae
detraxerat / servis amicus perfidis ('just as recently, when driven from the

sea, Neptune's son, the Captain, fled after his ships were burnt, and he
had threatened Rome with the shackles, which, friend of faithless
slaves, he had taken from them'; and on the aftermath of the battle of
Actium (Cann. 1. 37. 1 f.): nunc est bibendum, mmc pede libero / putsanda tel/us ('now should we drink, now should the earth be struck with
free foot'); see also Maria Wyke's article in this volume. On the shield of
Aeneas in Aeneid 8, the battle of Actium (675-753) is inscribed in a
version of Roman history as the most recent and 'central' (cf. in medio,
49

675) of a series of events represented as defences of Rome's libertas:

Aeneadae in ferrnm pro libertate 11lebant ('the descendants of AeI~eas
were charging against the sword for the sake of freedom', Aen. 8. 648).
30. E.g. Aen. 1. 294; HOL Epod. 7.13 f.; Call1l. 4.15.17.
31. Cf. DuQuesnay (1984), 36.
32. Cf. Wallace-Hadrill (1982), 19-36.
33. On syntactical structure as articulating ideological point of view,
d. Fowler (1986), 130 ff.; Thompson (1984),137.
34. The paradigm of harmony held emblematically to have been
breached in the civilwars, e.g. inAen 6. 828-31, Ov. Met. 1. 144 ff.
35. We should recall, however, the considerable cultural authority of
poetry at this time, even poetry which disclaimed the term of itself (e.g.
Sat. 1. 4). Horatian irony functions as a mode of collusion with, and
accommodation to, power whilst leaving the impression of distance
from it.
36. Cf. p. 38 below.
37. Cf. Sat. 1. 1. 1 ff.; these poems are programmatically de vita beata,
concerned with the 'good' life (cf. 1. 1. 117 f.). Cf. the way Macleod
(1977; 1979a; 1979b; 1981), following (i.e. reproducing and authorised
by) Horace's lead, collapses Horatian discourse into the 'ethical'. My
own collapsing of it into a category designated the 'political' is a tactical
act of defamiliarisation, not an assertion that this is THE meaning of
the text.
38. For a discussion of analyses of Horace's texts as propaganda
which unwittingly demonstrate their continuing success as propaganda .j
here and now, for which academic criticism is the vehicle, d. Kennedy
(1984), 157-60.
39. Where this division is placed is itself constitutive of political
discourse, cf. Ball (1988), 13. In recent criticism, feminism has played a
paradigmatic role in deconstructing conventional distinctions between .
'public' and 'private', with a view to showing the part such distinctions
play in the cultural construction of gender roles, and the interests
served thereby; cf. Greene and Kahn (1985), 15-17. These terms, as
fluid as any in political discourse, are particularly open to unexamined
reproduction and recontextualisation; cf. Zanker's assertion that
'(t]here is no doubt that the private life of luxury and aesthetic pleasures
in country villas enabled an already enfeebled aristocracy to accept
more easily the transition to one-man rule' (1988,31), which accommodates itself unproblematically within, and accepts as true, the assumptions of the Roman discourse of otiUI1l ('leisure').
40. Cf. Thompson(1984), 132.
41. Thuc. 3. 82; Sall. Cat. 52. 11. Cf. also Rudd (1986), 54 n.: 'they
(elements in Satires 1] can only be called 'political' in a rather extended
sense of the word'.
50

42. The product of a mode of explanation referred to as methodological individualism. For a critique of some of its assumptions, cf.
Lukes (1973), 110 ff.; and for an examination of the theory as a culturally specific historical construct cf. Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes
(1985). Its chief manifestation in literary criticism is intentionalism and
the poetics of presence (d. n. 81 below), in history the biographical
mode (termed 'fallacy' by those who would wish to escape from it),
which interprets history as the product of a single man's will, and reads
back from events to the intentions of the protagonists. On modern
literary theory as an attempt to de centre the individual as the legitimate
source of meaning, d. Young (1981), 8 ff. For the effect of methodological individualism on the study of imperial ruler-cult, d. Price (1984),

9-11.

43. Cf. Foucault (1982), 216-25. On the association of the traditional

notion of power with a figure ('The King') and with ideas of sovereignty
(the definition of power in accordance with methodological individualism), d. Foucault (1979), 97; (1986), 230-2. Ban (1988), 80-105, traces
the way that the concept of power as the political equivalent of efficient
causation is being contested, and perhaps is in the course of being
superseded, by an alternative account which views power as a constitutive feature of social life.
44. Cf. Foucault (1986), 232-4; Barnes (1989), 61-3.
45. So termed by Bourdieu (1977), 192, as a means of defamiliarising
the conceptual division between word and deed.

tion46.ofFor
his aorwriter,
her work
this anxiety
involves
can
a wide
be particularly
and remote
apute,
audience
for theover
recepan
extended period of time, during which this nexus of keaning and power
can change dramatically, leading to different conditions and modes of
reception and appropriation. Ovid's AI'S Amatoria and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses are two cases in point (cf. further n. 81 below).
Thus the function and meaning of a text are not fixed but inevitably
.change over time.
47. Ruthven (1984), 77.
48. Cf. Kennedy (1988), from which these remarks are taken, for an
examination of the ideological issues and hegemonic norms involved in
the recent critical reception of Ovid'sArs Amatoria.
49. Cf. Eagleton (1984), 25.
50. Cf. Hor. Epist. 1. 20. 17 f.: hoc quoque te manet, ut pueros
elelllenta docentem/occupet in 'vicis balba senectlls ('this too awaii.syou,
that stammering old age will find you teaching boys their ABCs in the
streets', Juv. 7. 226).
51. Cf. Kennedy (1984) for the way that acts of 'criticism' are acts of
ideological reproduction.
51

'/

"

..
I,

,I

52. Stahl (1985) demonstrates the way that critics have unwittingly
aligned themselves with some of the assumptions underlying Augustan
ideology in such a way as to demonstrate a continuing involvement in its
effects. He shows how two of the most influential critical ideas about
Propertius in this century, those of his alleged 'illogicality' and of his
'development' towards a 'mature' Augustan stance, arise out of an unperceived internalisation of Augustan perspectives, judgements, and
values; cf.Kennedy (1987).
53. Cf. Said (1984), 21.
54. Cf. Peradotto (1983), especially 17-19.
55. Cf. Said (1982/3),18 (= [1983,24]); Kennedy (1988), 78.
56. Cf. Jardine and Grafton (1987), 217.
57. Cf. Bennett (1979), 6-9, and Lentricchia (1983), 90: 'formalism is
merely the abstraction of technique from the context of power that
lends it its significance'; Bourdieu (1989), 214 f.
58. It is salutary to recall that all insights are produced only within
some intellectual framework which at the same time occludes, offering
explanations that are only partial. The (always frustrated) desire for
panoptic inclusiveness is the scholarly expression of the will to power.
Cf. p. 47 below.
59. Cf. Kennedy (1989).
60. Cf. Said (1985), 67; MacCabe (1986); Mitter (1987).
61. However, works which draw attention to themselves as interventions in a current ideological debate breach the discursive convention of
'apolitical objectivity' and attract the accusation that they are not 'scholarship'.
62. Cf.Kennedy (1988),74.
63. Cf. Lentricchia (1983), 125.
64. Cf. Gruen (1986), 51-72. Their co-existence without apparent
contradiction, the subject of Gruen's investigation, is remarkable and
worthy of note only within an essentialising framework of analysis, and
is paradoxical only in so far as one reproduces the assumptions of the
Roman discourse of peace (assumptions which include the essentialising of terms). The place of 'war' and 'peace' in Augustan ideology and
their attempted appropriation by the elegists will be the subject of
further analysis below, ,see pp. 42-7.
65. Cf. Bakhtin(1981); Jameson (1981); Dowling (1984), 131.
66. Cf. Foucault (1979), 100 f.
67. Cf. Cairns (1979), who presents a reading of Propertius 2. 7 as
supportive of Augustus, within, however, a rigidly intentionalist framework which is an over-accommodation to the hegemonic norms of Latin
literary scholarship.
68. Cf. Fish (1983/4); Lentricchia (1983), 15;,Williams (1977),112-13.
52

, 69. Cf. Said (1984), 24; along similar lines, but in a more disruptive
Ispirit,Terry Eagleton invokes the term 'servility' (1983, 124).
"', 70. Criticism which casts itself as 'oppositional' at the moment
characteristically appeals to 'realities', with which it aligns itself, 'outside' the institution of scholarship: For a shrewd analysis of this rhetoric
of 'inside/outside', d. Heath (1987).
, 71. Said (1984), 28.
72. Kennedy (1989).
, 73. Thompson (1984), 136.
74. Cf. Wallace-Hadrill (1982); Myerowitz (1985), 62-7; Hinds
(forthcoming).
75. As for example inArs 1. 177 ff.;Met.15. 852 ff.; or Fast. 1.1 ff.
76. Here we see the process of historical periodisation in action, by
which an age will be demarcated (with the battle of Actium, characterised as the transition from war to peace, as one of its boundaries)
and to which the name of Augustus will be attached. On the ideology of
periodisation, d. Martindale (forthcoming).
77. Cf. Ogilvie (1965), 94, on 1. 19.3: pace ten'a manque parta.
78. Cf. Aen 6. 851 ff,: tll rege/'(~imperio poplilos, Romane, memento /
(hae tibi el1l1lt artes) pacique imponere 11l0rem, / parcere subiectis et
debellare superbos ('Roman, remember to rule peoples with your auth-

ority (these will be your skills), and to impose custom upon peace, to
spare the conquered and subdue the arrogant'); Gruen (1986), 57-9, for
further passages and discussion, and 62 for a discussioll of the Ara Pacis
as representing the accomplishment of peace as inseparable from success m war.
79. Cf. for example Ov. Ars 1. 637, Fast. 3. 277 ff. (both cited below);
and Veyne (1989), 165, on the way such notions, taken to be self-evident, form the 'commonsense' of their day; however, as we shall see
immediately below, these notions can 'mean' different things, and perform different functions, in different circumstances, often beyond the
purview of their authors.
80. Cf. for example some of Ovid's references to the term pax: First,
Met. 15. 832 f.: pace data terris animum ad civilia vertet (sc Augustus) /
iura suum legesque Jeret iustissimus auctor / exemploque suo mores reget

('when peace has been imposed on the world, Augustus will turn his
attention to civil laws and, most just of legislators, will bring forward his
measures, and by his own example he will regulate morals') - 'peace' is
seen as the result of victory in war, and it is assumed that Augustus will
follow his role as Romulus with that of Numa and mould his people by
legislation to meet the 'demands' of peace. Secondly, Fast. 1. 711 ff.:
jrolldibus Actiacis comptos redimita capillos, / Pax, ades et toto mitis in
orbe malle. / dum desillt llOstes, desit quoque causa tnumphi: / tu ducibus
53

bello gloria maior eris ('Lend your presence and tarry in your gentleness

throughout the whole world, Peace, your neat hair bound with the
leaves of Actium. So long as foes are lacking, let the reason for a
triumph be absent also: you will be for our leaders a glory greater than
war') - peace is associated with the outcome of the battle of Actium,
seen as a world-wide settlement: toto ... in orbe (712) recalls the phrase
pace te"a marique pana. For the association of the end of hostilities
with the need to supervise morals, d. also Tr. 2. 231-4.
81. Though our conventional reading practices encourage us to look
through the text and the discourses which constitute it to an extra-textual individual (cf. Bourdieu, 1989,211), 'Ovid', no less than 'Augustus',
is the focus for a host of symbolic associations and is similarly always
open to ideological appropriation, often expressed in the rhetoric of the
poet's 'success' or 'failure': cf. e.g. Syme (1978), 215-29, a chapter entitled 'The Error of Caesar Augustus'; and Salman Rushdie, in a review
of Christoph Ransmayr's The Last World, which takes Ovid's composition of the Metamorphoses in exile as its subject, finds in Ovid a predecessor of his own experience: 'Artists, even the highest and finest of all,
can be crushed effortlessly at any old tyrant's whim' (The Independent
on Sunday, 13 May 1990). Although such judgements are presented as
final, they are a function of the ideological situation in which they are
made and continue to oscillate accordingly.
82. The topographical metaphor offers an image for the loss of that
belief: the abyss. The image expresses a fear of the deferral of meaning
(Derrida's difference), justifying the epistemology it is produced by, and
supports in turn, by means of the reassuringly solid and sensual metaphor of 'grounds'.
83. Within the framework of methodological individualism, social
structures can only be explained as the unforeseen consequences of
individual actions, d. Callinicos (1987),2.
84. Cf. Jameson (1981), 58: 'the working theoretical framework or
presuppositions of a given method are in general the ideology which
that method seeks to perpetuate'.
85. Cf. Stahl (1985) ..
86. Cf. Hor.Ars P. 73 ff., Ov. Rem. 361-96. These boundaries seem to
have been as firmly observed and policed in theory (whatever about
practice) as that between history and the novel today.
'
87. Exemplified in a writer such as Menander Rhetor, and reproduced in contemporary generic criticism. Formalism takes relations of
power for granted and suppresses the role of language in constituting
those relations of power; cf. Jameson (1981), 99 f.; Lentricchia (1983),
90.

88. Cf. Jameson (1981), 106: 'genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose
function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact'.
89. Cf. Gasche (1987), 151.
90. Cf. Henderson (1989), 68: 'History is a Discourse of traditional
scholarship practising willed-wilful imposition as an institution, installing the trope of wilful imposition in the academy of culture'; though of
Course the imposition he describes is not to be confined only to the
academic sphere. Any invocation of any term imposes its own closure.
91. Cf. Attridge, Bennington, and Young (1987), 9: 'history is organised only by a certain closure, a "shutting doWn" of historicity'.
92. I am grateful to Catharine Edwards, JoJtn Henderson, Stepheu
Hinds, Charles Martindale, Anton Powen, and Maria Wyke for their
perceptive observations at various stages in the evolution of this paper.

mihi dulces ignoscent, si quid peccaro stultus, amici.

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57

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I;'
1!1

I'

i!

Augustan Poets
and the Mutability of Rome1

II;
if

I'Ii
III
I

~~
\

Iii:

Philip Hardie
Two centuries before Gibbon heard the barefQoted friars singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, Joachim Du Bell~y mused on the half-buried remains of Rome and was led to write his sonnet sequence Les
amiquites de Rome, a work translated by Edmund Spenser as The
Rubles of Rome. The end of the third poem gives the flavour:
Rome now of Rome is th' only funerall,
And onely Rome of Rome hath victorie;
Ne ought save Tyber hastning to his fall
Remaines of all. worlds inconstancie!
That which is firme doth flit and fall away,
And that is flitting doth abide and stay.

Of:. \

58

Iii
~!1

Such musings were not peculiar to the post-antique period; a number of Hellenistic epigrams dwell on the bitter-sweet pleasure to be
derived from the contemplation of the former grandeur of cities such as
Mycenae, now the territory of a few shepherds. - The topos was taken up
by Lucan with a new and savage force in his description of Caesar's visit
to the site of Troy in Book 9 of the Bellum Civile (950-79), where
Caesar's careless and unwitting violation of the once holy places of the
city is only too clearly analogous to what he is doing, and will continue
to do, to the city of Rome itself. The analogy is driven home more
forcefully for the reader who recognises the Virgilian model for Caesar's tour of the vanished Troy at the transient moment of Rome's
greatest glory, in Aeneas' tour in Aeneid 8 of the humble landmarks of
\ 'Pallanteum at the point where Rome's history is about to begin. Eut
Lucan was by no means the first Roman to see in the destruction of
another great city a warning for Rome itself: in 146 Be, a date which
later generations were to regard as both the final seal on Rome's hegemony and the era of future decay, no less an imperialist than Scipio
59